CV

Academic appointments, education, research leadership, teaching, service, and honors.

Contact Information

Name Zengxiang Lei
Professional Title Transportation AI, Simulation, and Cyber-Physical Systems Researcher
Email lei67@purdue.edu
Phone 765-337-9885
Location West Lafayette, Indiana
Website https://tjleizeng.github.io

Professional Summary

I build scalable models and decision systems for ride-hailing, shared autonomous electric fleets, evacuation, and transportation security.

Experience

  • 2025 - Present

    West Lafayette, IN

    Postdoctoral Associate
    Transportation Cybersecurity and Resiliency Center, Purdue University
    • Lead research connecting METS-R SIM, CARLA, and an autonomous driving stack for controlled, repeatable scenario testing.
    • Develop amortized samplers for policy and control verification in simulated environments, with emphasis on rare, high-impact scenarios.
    • Study adversarial risks in autonomous mobility systems, including booking attacks, emergent adversarial driving maneuvers, and cybersecurity challenges for next-generation road transportation.
  • 2018 - 2024

    West Lafayette, IN

    Graduate Research Assistant
    Urban Mobility, Network and Intelligence Lab, Purdue University
    • Conducted research on pricing and fleet relocation, leading to publications in Transportation Research Part B and Transportation Research Part C.
    • Served as student lead for the U.S. Department of Energy METS-R project and contributed substantially to METS-R SIM, a city-scale multimodal electric vehicle simulator.
    • Analyzed large-scale GPS and trajectory data to study evacuation, return, pandemic-era mobility, and transportation hub operations.

Education

  • 2018 - 2024

    West Lafayette, IN

    Ph.D.
    Purdue University
    Transportation and Infrastructure Systems Engineering
    • Dissertation: Towards an Efficient and Secure Ride-hailing Service.
    • Selected coursework: Reinforcement Learning, Real Analysis and Measure Theory, Security Analytics.
  • 2011 - 2018

    Shanghai, China

    M.S.E. and B.S.
    Tongji University
    Transportation Planning and Management; Transportation Engineering

Selected Research and Open-Source Leadership

Honors and Awards

  • 2024
    Eldon J. Yoder Memorial Award
    Purdue University

    2024-2025 academic year.

  • 2019
    NSF Innovation Corps Midwest Industry Connect Grant
    National Science Foundation I-Corps Midwest

    Awarded for work on social ride-sharing.

  • 2018
    Chinese Patent: A Method for Evaluating Reserve Capacity of Urban Metro Networks
  • 2017
    Peikun Transportation Talent Fund Award
    Tongji University
  • 2014
    13th Competition of Transport Science, First Prize

    Project: Research on Spatial Activity Patterns Based on Smartphone Data.

Invited Talks and Seminars

  • “Transportation Cybersecurity: A Network-Level Perspective.” TraCR Scholar Webinar Series, August 27, 2025.
  • “Adversarial Booking Attacks for On-Demand Mobility Services.” Purdue Institute of Transportation Engineers Student Chapter Seminar, November 28, 2023.

Teaching and Mentorship

Co-Instructor, CE564: Data Science for Smart Cities: Delivered four weeks of lectures and developed instructional materials on deep learning and reinforcement learning for transportation systems at Purdue University.
Research Mentorship: Mentored seven students and junior collaborators on transportation simulation, mobility analytics, and security-focused research, contributing to a Transportation Research Part E publication and manuscripts submitted to competitive AI and systems venues.

Professional Service

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security; IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems; Transportation Research Parts B, C, D, and E; Transportation; Multimodal Transportation; Transportation Research Record; Data Science for Transportation; European Journal of Operational Research; Operations Research Perspectives; Scientific Reports; Energy.
Conference Reviewer: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence; Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems; ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining; IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium; IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference; IEEE International Conference on Vehicular Electronics and Safety.
Event Coordinator: ITE Special Seminar (2025), "Interdisciplinary Intelligent Transportation Systems: Traffic Control and Travel Time Dynamics," speaker Dr. Pushkin Kachroo.

Skills

Research Areas: Transportation AI, simulation-based verification, mobility-on-demand, shared autonomous electric vehicles, transportation cybersecurity, disaster mobility
Methods: reinforcement learning, agent-based simulation, large-scale mobility analytics, scenario search, trajectory data analysis